The European Parliament adopted by 535 votes to 38, with 48 abstentions, a legislative resolution on the proposal for a regulation of the European Parliament and of the Council concerning the establishment of a Union framework for the collection, management and use of data in the fisheries sector and support for scientific advice regarding the Common Fisheries Policy (recast).
Parliaments position adopted at first reading following the ordinary legislative procedure amended the Commission proposal.
Aims: this Regulation aims to establish rules on the collection, management and use of biological, environmental, technical and socio-economic data concerning the fisheries sector.
The data collection framework should contribute towards reaching the objectives of the Common Fisheries Policy, which includes the protection of the marine environment, the sustainable management of all commercially exploited species, and in particular the achievement of good environmental status in the marine environment by 2020.
Multiannual Union programme: the Commission shall establish a multiannual Union programme for the collection and management of data while taking into account:
Parliament stated that it is appropriate for a sufficient number of mandatory research surveys at sea to be carried out at Union level.
National work plans: the Commission shall take into account the evaluation conducted by STECF when approving the national work plans. If such evaluation indicates that a national work plan does not ensure the scientific relevance of the data or sufficient quality of the proposed methods and procedures, the Commission shall immediately inform the Member State concerned and indicate amendments to that work plan.
National work plans shall contain a detailed description of, inter alia, the following: (i) data to be collected in accordance with the multiannual Union programme; (ii) the temporal and spatial distribution and the frequency by which the data will be collected.
Regional coordination and cooperation: Member States shall cooperate and coordinate their actions to further improve the quality, timeliness and coverage of data enabling the reliability of data collection methods to be further improved, with a view to improving their data collection activities.
Regional coordination groups shall aim at developing and implementing procedures, methods, quality assurance and quality control for collecting and processing data with a view to enabling the reliability of scientific advice to be further improved. For that purpose, regional coordination groups shall aim to develop and implement regional databases.
Access to the sampling sites: the masters of Union fishing vessels may refuse to accept on board the scientific observers operating under the at-sea monitoring scheme only on the basis of an obvious lack of space on the vessel or for safety reasons in accordance with national law. In such cases, data shall be collected through alternative data collection methods which are set out in the national work plan.
Availability of data: Member States shall refrain from any unnecessary restrictions to the dissemination of detailed and aggregated data to end-users of scientific data and other interested parties.
A Member State may refuse to transmit the relevant detailed and aggregated data if there is a risk of natural persons or legal entities being identified, in which case the Member State concerned shall propose alternative means to meet the needs identified by the end-users of scientific data which ensure anonymity.